About Eco Home Style

Eco Home Style is a blog about building a modest but stylish passive solar house in Perth. This blog started as a way of sharing my journey with my friends. But now it’s my hope that by sharing this experience, you will gain more insight into the building process and know what to watch out for.

Why we decided to build

We loved the area we lived in, despite it being on a busy road. So we decided to take the plunge – knock the house down and build something new. Something more liveable.

Somewhere where we wouldn’t freeze in winter and swelter in summer. A place that we wouldn’t be too embarrassed to invite people over to. And a place where we can invite friends to stay the night, or longer.

Our old house had one liveable room – the lounge. It had one reverse-cycle air conditioner, which meant that often the lounge was the only comfortable place in the house. It was starting to feel like a jail.

We briefly considered renovating and extending, but decided that we wanted to start afresh, and the layout of the house would make it very difficult to extend.

Ever since my early uni days, I’d decided that if I were to build a house, it would be a passive solar design, as it doesn’t make sense to me to design something that doesn’t take advantage of the local environment, and I’m all for lower energy bills.

Artistic render of our new house (Architect: Solar Dwellings)

We also want to include rainwater tanks, grey water recycling, and more solar panels. Again, it doesn’t make sense to me to not capture the water falling free from the sky, or to not divert grey water into the garden, especially on this dry continent of ours.

We’re also fortunate that one of our good friends is an award-winning landscaper, and he’s offered to design our gardens and help with the work. I’m almost more excited about that than I am about the house!

Who we are building with

We engaged renowned architects Griff Morris and Ken Wibberley of Solar Dwellings to design our passive solar house. We then put the design to tender and engaged Nulook Homes to build it.

Who we are

When I started this blog, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with it. The initial intention was to capture the progress of the build, but it’s kind of morphed into a tool that will also allow me to explore and solidify our design decisions, share our experiences with our friends, and share some building tips with other people who want to build.

So welcome to my blog! The main players are:

Trixee – that’s me. I enjoy cocktails by the pool, have a fondness for chocolate, and am pining for our house to be built so I can get a dog. You can contact me at trixee@gmail.com.

Mr Trixee – the love of my life. He enjoys his toys, is technologically gifted, and indulges my whims. Anything fancy on this blog is probably his doing.

We’ve been living in our current place for a few years now. It has character but is too small, lacks entertaining areas, and thermal performance is really poor. However we love the area, so we’re knocking it down and rebuilding. This is our first and probably only house we’re building, I don’t think I could handle the stress again!
Glad you like the plan. The unusual angles are a direct consequence of the passive solar design fitting in with the block orientation. Getting the roof oriented to north was apparently a bit of a challenge and we’ve been told that the chippies will have a lot of “fun” with it!

I bet you could buy specific detergent that had proper ph balance. Not sure? But that would probably help. I still think it’s such a good idea. We are going to harvest our rainwater. We are always so dry here too. Any water conservation is so important.

There have been studies done (http://www.lanfaxlabs.com.au/greywater.htm) but professional landscapers (e.g. Josh Byrne) still persist in spruiking the benefits of it that I’m a bit sceptical, so I figure it’s worth trying it out myself and monitoring to see how it goes 🙂 I agree that water conservation is incredibly important… unfortunately I also like my long showers, so I’m somewhat conflicted!

Hi Trish, thank you for visiting my blog! Sorry I haven’t updated in a while, we’ve been busy doing DIY landscaping, which is taking for-ever but hope to have it finished this winter! Congratulations on deciding to build, it can be stressful but also a hugely rewarding process, you just learn so much. I absolutely love my house, and struggle to think of much that I’d change. The layout really works well for us, and the thermal comfort is great. Obviously, extreme temperatures require a bit of human intervention to make comfortable, but most of the time it’s really nice. If you haven’t spoken with Griff yet, you should, he’ll talk your socks off but is so knowledgeable. One thing I would highly recommend is to consult a good interior designer on tile and cabinetry colours, these things make a huge impact on the overall look of the house, but I wouldn’t stress too much about the wall colours as they are easy to change. I’m happy to answer any specific questions you may have, good luck with the process!